What is Wusage?

Wusage is a robust site statistics package. It shows you how many visits you’ve had, what pages have been visited most, etc. This program is already installed and running on your domain.

How do I use Wusage?

To count accesses, there is a directory called wusage in your www directory. To access it, just log on the Internet and with your web browser, go to:http://www.yourdomain.com/wusage. You will see a “Calendar of Reports” page. If monthly reports are enabled, just click on the name of the month to view those reports. If weekly reports are enabled, just click on the number corresponding to the number of the week (at the left of each week in the calendar) you wish to view.

Can I see my visitor’s domain names instead of their IP Number?

Yes. If you would like to see domain names in your stats and other programs rather than just IP numbers, put an empty (blank) text file in your www/wusage directory nameddns (no extensions). This will act as a switch and reverse authentication will be activated for the domain.

Can I just view my Raw Access Log?

The Raw Access Log which comes standard with each new domain gives you the IP# of the visitor, the date and time of the visit, the page visited, and the call method of the page (GET vs. POST).

In your home directory, you will see a file called access-log. You can download this file (in ASCII format) and open it in any word processor or text editor. In your FTP client, click on access-log, and “Get Link as File”. Please refer to your FTP client’s manual for the instructions on how to do this in your specific FTP client.

I don’t see referrers in Wusage. How do I know where my visitors came from?

Referrer logs will tell you exactly where the visitor came from (e.g. Search Engine with the keywords used to find you, other web site, etc.) If referrer logs are available for your account type, you need to install them from the Extras section of your Plusmail control panel.

Can I customize Wusage output?

Yes, you can customize Wusage by manually editing the file named wusage.conflocated in your www/wusage directory. Please note that we cannot provide support for wusage report customization. If problems occur, all we can do is reinstall the default configuration of wusage.

Interpreting WUSAGE Reports

For a brief overview of what exactly WUSAGE is trying to tell you, read on:

The History Page

The first page that you see when browsing your WUSAGE directory contains summary statistics for your account since it was installed on our servers. It presents a graph and table describing “Overall Accesses” that summarizes your entire web site; and it presents a graph and table that describes your “Home Page,” or index page:

Totals (Overall Accesses)

Item

Total Accesses

Total Bytes

Average Accesses

Average Bytes

Latest Accesses

Latest Bytes

Overall Accesses

813,307

3,869,134,058

8,299

39,480,959

7,697

47,911,333

Home Page Accesses

Item

Total Accesses

Total Bytes

Average Accesses

Average Bytes

Latest Accesses

Latest Bytes

Home Page Accesses

47,182

323,294,556

481

3,298,924

1,350

7,252,596

Definitions

An “access” represents the download of one “element” of your web site. Elements include the HTML document itself plus all associated images. Example: If your web page includes 5 images, each time someone views that web page, it will contribute 6 accesses (1 for your web page plus 1 for each of the 5 images.) In the tables above, the Overall Access statistics count all elements on all of your web pages. Home Page Accesses count only the HTML document associated with your default home page.

“Bytes” measures the bandwidth consumed by your web site. An image on your web page that is 25 kB in size will contribute 25,000 bytes each time someone views that page.

Weekly Reports

The weekly reports provide a much higher level of detail.

Overall Statistics

Category

Total

Unique sites served

113

Unique documents served

9

Unique trails followed

17

Total visits

163

Unique sites served:

Every visitor to your web site has a unique IP (Internet Protocol) number associated with his or her Internet connection. The “unique sites served” figure represents the total number of those unique IP#s that have visited your site.

Unique documents served:

This represents the number of HTML documents, or web pages, that your visitors have viewed.

Unique trails followed:

A “trail” represents a unique sequence of pages viewed by your visitors. For example, if a visitor clicks on your home page (index.html), then on your information page (info.html), then on your contact page (contact.html), that visitor’s “trail” is described by index.html -> info.html -> contact.html. WUSAGE lets you know how many different trails visitors are following through your web site.

Total visits:

This is the number of times a visitor “clicked in” to your web site. It will be larger than “Unique sites served” if the same visitor (with the same unique IP#) clicked in more than once.

Accesses per Hour & Accesses per Day

This just lets you know what times of day and which days of the week are busiest for your web site.

Contents of / Sorted by Access Count

This shows you what directories and subdirectories are most popular within your web site.

Totals

Item

Accesses

Bytes

Overall Accesses

181

599,344

Home Page Accesses

158

129,203

This provides the same information for the current period as that provided in the initial History page .

Top 10 of x Documents Sorted by Access Count

Tells you what your top 10 most popular pages are. x is the total number of documents viewed.

Top 50 of x Sites by Access Count

This lets you know where your top 50 visitors are coming from — if you uploaded thedns file into your WUSAGE directory, it displays the resolved IP of your visitor; if you didn’t upload the file, it displays unique IP number.

Top 10 of x Referring URLs by Access Count

If you have extended referral logs installed on your account, WUSAGE will report the URLs of the pages your visitors are viewing immediately before coming to your site. This information lets you know what other web sites and search engines are linking to yours.

Visits Report

10 Example Visits

Allows you to follow 10 random visitors through the trail they took through your web site.

Top x of y Documents Not Found

If a visitor attempts to browse a page on your site that does not exist, a 404 File Not Found Error is generated. This error could result because the visitor mistyped the URL, because you have a broken link somewhere in your web site, or because some browsers and search engines look for certain files automatically. This section tells you what pages are generating the 404 error.

There are at least two files that appear frequently in this report. These are files that search engines and browsers look for automatically:

robots.txt

The robots.txt file is part of the robots exclusion standard. You can use this file to control how search engine “robots” spider your web site.

favicon.ico

This is a file used by later versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser. Internet Explorer allows you to customize the icon that appears in the visitors “Favorites” list when they bookmark your site.

The appearance of these files in your “Not Found” statistics is not cause for alarm. Your web site will function perfectly without them.

Accesses by Result Code

The Apache web server generates a “result code” each time a visitor calls a URL from your site. This section provides a summary of those result codes.

Hi, I am the editor of Hosting Manual. I am managing several small business websites for my clients, hosted by various web hosts. That's how the idea came to create this website and share some of my experience. Feel free to contact me either via the contact form or through social media.